Warning

James B. Stewart is the financial journalist who became mildly famous in the 1980s writing about Michael Milken et al, not the star of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“Junk,” the riveting reincarnation of the junk bond era now playing at Lincoln Center, “is a fictionalized account suggested by events in the historical public record,” according to an author’s note in the program. … But make no mistake about it: “Junk” is about as close to reality as theater gets.

I should know: I’m the author of “Den of Thieves,” which chronicled the rise and fall of Michael Milken and his junk bond empire and the cast of characters that whirled around him. The author of “Junk,” Ayad Akhtar, has cited my book and “The Predators’ Ball,” Connie Bruck’s pathbreaking account of Mr. Milken’s heyday at Drexel Burnham Lambert, as works that influenced his play.

I read both books back in the day. They have had some influence on me.

Part of the fun of watching “Junk” is matching the characters to their real-life counterparts: the junk bond trader Robert Merkin (Mr. Milken); the arbitrageur Boris Pronsky (Ivan Boesky); the United States attorney Giuseppe Addesso (Rudolph Giuliani). …

Perhaps it has taken the perspective gained over nearly three decades to see what a turning point in American history the late 1980s turned out to be, and how they shaped, as Mr. Akhtar puts it, “the world we inhabit today.”

“The 1980s represents a collapse of a collective vision of who we were as Americans,” Mr. Akhtar told me last week when we met to discuss his play. “This is where the Trump presidency began.” (As one character puts it: “We used to be a country that paid our bills. That made things.”)

As a continuation or a reaction? Part of Trump’s appeal to voters contra Mitt Romney’s lack of appeal is that Trump made things, giant buildings, while Mitt’s financial engineering did not. (In Mitt’s defense, he seemed to find his extremely lucrative profession unfulfilling and went into public service before he made the billions he could have made if he had stayed in the game.)

“I believe Milken was a great genius,” Mr. Akhtar continued. At the same time, “there’s something demonic about genius.”

“You’re not going to find prevailing notions of morality in someone who’s really thinking outside the box,” he said.

Mr. Akhtar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 play, “Disgraced,” doesn’t minimize the fictional Merkin’s crimes. (He engages in a blatant insider trading conspiracy with Pronsky, something Mr. Milken never admitted and insisted never happened.) But Merkin says he has no choice. He’s an outsider to privilege, partly because he’s Jewish and partly because he threatens the existing order.

Referring to the chief executive of his latest target, Merkin says: “We’ve dealt with guys like this our whole lives. Guys who’d laugh at us, we tried a get a job at their banks, their firms, whatever. Shut out our dads. For God’s sake, my father? Graduated top of his class, Brooklyn College. Couldn’t get an interview at Hartford, Jordan Guaranty, half a dozen other white-shoe firms in the city he’d had his heart set on. Because he was a Jew. Here’s a guy. Loyal. To a fault. Sharp as a razor. Good with numbers.” All he could aspire to was “balance the books of dry cleaners and dentists.”

When his wife warns him not to commit insider trading with Pronsky, Merkin respondss: “How do you think J. P. Morgan made the kind of money he did? Rockefeller? Carnegie? They bent the rules. That’s how they made their fortunes. And the world lived with it. No, the world loved it.”

In Mr. Akhtar’s telling, Merkin emerges as a full-throated advocate for a cosmopolitan globalism that’s the antithesis of Trump/Bannon America-first populism. At an investor conference (an obvious reference to what came to be known as Mr. Milken’s Predators’ Balls), Merkin proclaims: “Let’s set aside the revolting assumption that God doesn’t bless other nations, or that somehow an American father’s job is more important to his family than a Chinese father’s job is to his.”

I’ve been to several of Milken’s post-prison Davos-style philanthropic versions of his old Predator’s Ball that he hosts annually at the Beverly Hilton. I even talked to him once and got to experience his slightly alien level of intelligence and focus. And, yeah, that’s his spiel: globalism.

Let’s just set aside those lies. Those delusions. And let’s stick with the facts.

“Fact: They are winning. Fact: We need to understand why. Fact: We need to change. When you stay blind, you can’t change. When you can’t change, you die. And that is what is happening in this country right now.”

To some, this may seem a surprisingly benign, not to mention farsighted, view of Mr. Milken, who pleaded guilty in 1990 to six counts of securities fraud and was initially sentenced to 10 years in prison, later reduced to two. …

But not everyone in the 1980s was driven primarily by money. Dennis Levine, the investment banker whose 1986 arrest for insider trading led to the unraveling of Mr. Milken’s empire, fatally underestimated the skill and determination of the hardworking, underpaid government lawyers investigating him.

“Only morons would work for $50,000 a year,” he memorably told his co-conspirators, assuring them that they had nothing to worry about.

Despite their vast collective wealth, Mr. Levine, Mr. Boesky and Mr. Milken couldn’t buy the verdicts they sought and were convicted and sent to prison. That was “a tribute to the American system of justice,” I wrote in 1991, when “Den of Thieves” was published.

That the elder Bush Administration put Milken in prison … wow, that was a long time ago.

Twenty-six years later, Mr. Akhtar said he was more cynical. “Your book had a strong moral underpinning,” he told me. But, invoking the alternate-reality towns of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” he added: “We’re in Pottersville now, not Bedford Falls.”

I think this is a pretty fair summation of some major trends in American history.